San Juan, Puerto Rico

What was San Juan like in 1715?

Juan Ponce de León founded the first Spanish town, Caparra, beside the bay in 1508. In 1521 the settlers moved to a rocky islet at the bay’s entrance, where Old San Juan stands today. Oddly, the names later swapped: the town was first called Puerto Rico (“rich port”) and the island San Juan, and over time people came to use them the other way round.

By the time Silver & Sails begins, San Juan was above all a military town. Spain valued it as a key guard post at the eastern edge of the Caribbean. Soldiers, officials, priests and craftsmen lived inside its walls, and a royal governor ruled the island from San Juan. His home was La Fortaleza, a fort built in 1537 that is still the governor’s residence today.

The whole island was thinly peopled, with roughly 20,000 inhabitants in 1700. The garrison was paid by the situado, a yearly subsidy sent from the silver treasury of Mexico. It often arrived late or not at all, which left soldiers and townspeople short of money.

How old is El Morro, and how was San Juan defended?

Castillo San Felipe del Morro, usually just called El Morro, was begun in 1539 on the headland that guards the narrow mouth of the bay. Builders kept enlarging and repairing it for about 250 years.

After a Dutch attack in 1625, Spain began a second great fort, San Cristóbal, and a ring of stone walls in 1634. According to the National Park Service, the whole city was enclosed by 1650. So in 1715 San Juan was already a walled city under El Morro.

Much of what visitors see today came later. After the officer Alexander O’Reilly inspected the defences in 1765, engineers spent about 25 years rebuilding them, and most of the bastions now standing date from 1765 to the 1780s. In 1983 the forts and La Fortaleza became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Was San Juan ever captured?

Yes, though not in the game’s years. In November 1595 the English raider Francis Drake attacked and was driven off. In 1598 George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, landed an English force and took the city, but disease forced his men to leave after about two months.

In 1625 a Dutch fleet under Boudewijn Hendricksz seized the town and besieged El Morro for weeks. The fortress held, and the Dutch burned much of San Juan before sailing away. After that disaster, Spain walled the city. The National Park Service records no major attack on the forts between then and a failed British attack in 1797.

What did Puerto Rico trade around 1715?

Earlier, in the 1500s and 1600s, Puerto Rico grew sugar and ginger with the forced labour of enslaved Africans. By 1715 sugar had shrunk to a small business. Most of the land was given over to huge cattle ranches called hatos, and the island’s main export was cattle hides, used in Europe for leather. Ginger and tobacco were also grown.

Spain allowed its colonies to trade only with Spanish ships, and few came to Puerto Rico. So islanders bought cloth, tools, flour and other goods from English, French, Dutch and Danish traders instead, usually paying in hides, tobacco or cattle. In Spanish law this was smuggling. The historian Francisco Moscoso calls it the islanders’ main way of trading until well into the 1700s.

Read more about hides and deerskins and tobacco.

Who were Puerto Rico’s guardacostas?

Guardacostas (“coast guards”) were privately owned armed ships licensed by Spanish governors to stop foreign smugglers. The owners kept a share of what they seized, so the system rewarded captures, and foreign merchants complained that many seizures were simply robbery.

Puerto Rico’s most famous guardacosta owner was Miguel Enríquez, born in San Juan in the 1670s, the son of a freed woman of African descent. He trained as a shoemaker, then turned to privateering during the War of the Spanish Succession, when Spain had few warships of its own in the Caribbean. His fleet of fast sloops, schooners and brigantines took British, Dutch, Danish and French vessels. Captured cargoes sometimes included enslaved people, who were sold again rather than freed.

The king made Enríquez a Captain of Sea and War and awarded him a royal medal, and he became the richest man on the island. His captures were raised again and again in Britain’s House of Commons. In 1717 or 1718 his ships helped drive foreign settlers off the nearby island of Vieques. But when Spain wanted peace with Britain, he lost royal favour. From 1735 he lived in a San Juan convent to escape his enemies, and he died poor in 1743. The historian Ángel López Cantos, who studied his papers in Seville, calls him Puerto Rico’s first great national hero.

Why did enslaved people escape to Puerto Rico?

From the mid-1600s, enslaved people on the British, Dutch, French and Danish islands knew that Spanish colonies might take them in. Under a policy historians call religious sanctuary, a runaway who reached Spanish territory and asked to become a Catholic could be protected and, in many cases, freed. Spain issued orders for particular colonies in 1680, 1693 and 1704, and a decree of 1750 applied the rule across its whole empire.

The policy was not simple kindness. It drew workers to thinly settled Spanish lands and weakened rival plantation colonies. But historians stress that it was enslaved people themselves, by escaping, who drove Spain to make these laws.

Puerto Rico lay only a short sail from the Virgin Islands, where Denmark had settled St. Thomas in 1672. Many people escaped from there, from Dutch St. Eustatius and, later, from St. Croix in canoes and small boats. The historian Neville Hall called them “maritime maroons”: people who escaped slavery by sea. Some settled at San Mateo de Cangrejos, a free Black community just east of San Juan, today’s Santurce. Danish planters repeatedly asked for them back, often without success.

See also Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas.